BCCI appoints Rahul Johri as CEO

The Board for Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) has appointed Rahul Johri as its first chief executive officer (CEO), reports the Mint. He will join the agency on the 1st of June and report directly to BCCI secretary Anurag Thakur. He will be responsible for the overall functioning of the BCCI.

Prior to BCCI, Johri was the executive vice-president and general manager for Discovery Networks where he worked for over 15 years. He lead Discovery’s South Asia operations for over 8 years and had resigned from his post in February this year. Note that appointing a full time CEO was a recommendation made by the Supreme Court appointed Lodha Committee.

Lodha Committee recommendations: The Lodha committee has recommended that the BCCI have a maximum of six managers to assist the CEO, in the streams of operations, finance, technical, compliance (legal), media and human resources. The CEO’s tenure should also be fixed at five years, and can be terminated by mutual agreement of a 3 month notice.

Other than this the Lodha report also aims to address issues of conflict of interest, corruption, lack of transparency etc., in the cricketing body. The report had provided a detailed questionnaire to the BCCI and other stakeholders asking about the organization, structure and relationship of BCCI and IPL, audit, accounts and finances, oversight and transparency, player welfare and dispute resolution among other things. The full report can be found here.

Other developments:

– Earlier this month, in a legal notice to application developers, “Copyright Integrity International”, an entity which represents BCCI-IPL, warned application developers against showcasing what it called “Proprietary content” in their apps. This included match related content such as scorecards, schedules, commentary and audio-visual footage.

– In July last year, Paytm purchased the rights for title sponsorship from the BCCI for all home series to be played in India till 2019. Previously, smartphone maker Micromax held the rights for a year, after STAR group and Sahara held the rights in the preceding years.

– Last year, Novi Digital, a subsidiary of Star India Private Ltd, had picked up rights to the Indian Premier League (IPL) Cricket tournament for 2015, 2016 and 2017, for India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, for an undisclosed amount.